Aiwropais Ahvos

Mon May 22 06:03:12 UTC 2006

Hi Ualarauans!

You understood wrong. I never connected the hypothetic "white community" with the Goths. More probably they were Baltic or Venedic people.
You are wrong also regarding another your statement. "Chyud" means nothing in Old Church Slavonic, neither "ancient giants" nor anything else. In Old Russian "Chyud" is used exclusively as an ethnonym with undefined ethnicity. Never and nowhere the old Russian annals defined "Chyud" as the Baltic Finns (nor the Balts, nor Finns). The Finnish attribution of "Chyud" is only a tradition of the Russian historiography with no real grounds.
I do not believe "some Gothic Gefolgschafts having went too far east finally dissolved among Finns bringing that layer of Germanic loanwords into Baltic Finnish". Vice versa. It seems more likely that the Finnish tribes populated neighborhoods of Chyudskoye lake in the middle of the first millennium AD, only a little bit earlier than the Slavs. And the main question is: Who were the aborigines here? According to Tacitus, the entire southern coast of Baltic See was Germanic in the first centuries AD. I do not see reasons to deny the Germanic substrate for the mentioned region as well. I would not risk contending that there were the Goths, as we understand them nowadays, but some unknown East Germanic people looks very probable. I guess it were forefathers of the so-called Izhora (i.e. Ingermanni).

Vladimir

-----Original Message-----
From: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com [mailto:gothic-l at yahoogroups.com]On
Behalf Of Guenther Ramm
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 8:11 PM
To: gothic-l at yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [gothic-l] Aiwropais Ahvos

еЗПТПЧ чМБДЙНЙТ <vegorov at ipiran.ru> wrote:  
> Hi Ualarauans and others!

> Of course, rivers of various "colors" are scattered around the world, and the

> name "White river" is too habitual to draw with such an argument to quick

conclusions. In some cases, a "white" community may be of importance, in most

cases not. For example, I guess a "white" area encompasses Baltic countries (the

> stem balt- means in Lithuanian white) and Belarus (the stem bel- means in Slavic

> same white). But I do not see reasons to expand this community up to Volga.

The official Russian history considers the so called "chyud'" of Old Russian

chronicles as a Finnish people that populated the territory around old Novgorod

> on Volkhov. Though long ago linguists derived this "chyud'" from Gothic "thiuda"

> (with palatalization of th and d), the official Russian science refused to admit

> the evident facts in its perpetual fight against the so called "normanism", i.e.

> participation of any Germanic components in creation of the first Russian state

> Kiev's Rus'. Meanwhile, if the Chernyakhov culture was Gothic, if the "chyud'"

> was a Germanic tribe, everything changes in the old Russian prehistory!

Derivation of the name of Volkhov river from Old Germanic is therefore of great

> interest and importance. I would be very grateful to everybody who could clarify

> this point a little bit if nothing else.

> Vladimir

  - So you think (if I understood right) this "white" proto-people of the Northeast Europe were Goths? I guess the word tchiud' (singulative tchiudinu) meant something like "ancient giant", "Rephaim" in Old Church Slavonic and is really a reflex of borrowed thiuda, this latter being an auto-ethnonym of some part of East-Germanic wandering communities (cf. analogical development in NHG Huene "giant" < OHG Hu:ni "Huns" - is there in Russian some tchiud'-derived pendant to German Huenenbett or Huenengrab referring to prehistoric mounds?). That the East-Slavic (= Old Russian) annals applied this term to some of Baltic Finns may stand in witness of the fact that some Gothic Gefolgschafts having went too far east finally dissolved among Finns bringing that layer of Germanic loanwords into Baltic Finnish which is usually connected with East-Germanic, e.g. miekka < mekeis, niekla < nethla etc. Given this we could seriously discuss the problem of possible Gothic toponymics in
 Northwest Russia.
  That involves also the question of Gothic "landing points" - was it the Vistula mouth (Goth. *Gutiskandi / *Gipidaujos?) only or maybe some other parts of the South Baltic coast as well? Perhaps the Gulf of Riga and even the Gulf of Finland?
  You know there's Peipus lake between Russia and Estonia which is Tchiudskoye ozero in Russian - could it have been once and be again *Thiudisks saiws (Max Vasmer's old hypothesis)?

  Ualarauans

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